


April Ashes

by Eupheno



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: (not from any of the characters but it's there), Alternate Universe - 1900s, Cannibalism, Dark, Nobility (sort of), POV Christophe Giacometti, POV Yuri Plisetsky, Period-Typical Homophobia, gothic horror, probably some angst too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 01:31:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12378114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eupheno/pseuds/Eupheno
Summary: A hundred years ago, Yuri's ancestor burned his estate down to its very foundations. It has stood empty ever since—until he and Mila decide to investigate, against all odds, the reason behind the fire. A mysterious diary may provide the clues they need.But some things are better left forgotten.





	April Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> If you clicked this I don't know what to tell you except I'm sorry.
> 
> I didn't check the Graphic Violence box because I don't think it applies. There's no violence.  
> But.  
> There's some description of human remains, and the violence is sort of implied, and off-screen.

“Your ancestor must have been a strange man.”

Yuri sighed and snapped the album shut. He’d been glued to this shit for three hours, three painstakingly long hours in which he’d tried to decipher what the _fuck_ was written next to all those grainy-ass photos. Volnyvo this, Volnyvo that, and a whole bunch of shots of old men with gloomy faces. His ancestors, he’d been told. All the _Grafs_ of Volnyvo down to the very last, Victor Nikiforov.

“He was a nutjob,” Yuri said. “And he wasn’t my ancestor.”

Mila pouted and rolled off the sofa. “Details,” she said. “Great great great uncle then.”

Yuri hadn’t always known about his ancestry. How could he? He was adopted, and nobility hadn’t really been a thing in Russia lately. But curiosity had grabbed him by the neck and it hadn’t let go until he’d tracked down his birth mother in Novgorod. She’d handed him a box of stuff and then told him to never contact her again.

“Here.” Mila stood and pressed a stack of paper into his hands. A photocopy of a photocopy of a journal, it seemed, and scribbled with annotations on the edges. The text was barely visible, let alone legible. And certainly not Cyrillic. Yuri had discarded the stack almost as soon as he’d taken it out of the box.

“What do I want with this?” He gave an impatient click with his tongue and dropped the stack onto the table. “Mila, what _language_ is that even?”

Mila chuckled and picked it up. “It’s French, Yuri.” She flipped a few pages until she found what she was looking for. “‘Victor Nikiforov is not a punctual man. I’ve known this when we were children and he failed to arrive to breakfast on time because he was too preoccupied with the dead animals in—’ Well, I can’t read this, but see? A strange man.”

Yuri snatched the papers from her hand. Now that she’d said it, he did find a couple words here and there that were unmistakably French, a few pages farther back. But unlike Mila, his knowledge of the language began with _oui_ and _non_ and ended with _voulez-vous coucher avec moi?_

“Who wrote this?” he asked.

Mila shrugged. “A friend? I don’t know.”

Yuri leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He didn’t know much about Victor Nikiforov except that he’d burned down his own house.

“Why French? How much of it did you read?”

“Not much. I just skimmed through the whole thing, but it’s really hard to read. But here—” she pointed to one of the annotations, a French-sounding name in faded pencil “—I looked it up. It’s an estate in Switzerland that used to belong to the Nikiforovs. Might explain the French.”

“Hm.” Yuri uncrossed his arms and scowled at the journal as if he could intimidate it into spilling its contents. Victor Nikiforov was an elusive bastard; there was almost no information on him online except for some shady ancestry sites and a link to a creepypasta Yuri hadn’t bothered to read. That journal however...

“Oh!”

“What.” Yuri turned to look at her, scowling. Mila was beaming, looking down at her phone as if she’d found out Yakov had given them an extra week off.

“Look.” She’d done an image search for “Volnyvo”, and apparently the mansion still existed. Burned black and overrun with weeds, but it existed.

“And?”

“Yuri,” she said, “let’s go there.”

* * *

 

13th of September, 1907

 

Victor Nikiforov is not a punctual man. I knew this when we were children and he failed to arrive to breakfast on time because he was too preoccupied with the dead animals in his room, and I know this today because he kept me waiting outside his manor. I rang at the gate five times, so I believe I’m entitled to this opinion. And Victor had known I would arrive today, because Victor himself had sent me those first class train tickets along with a plea for me to “come at your earliest convenience.”

Yet there was no one waiting for me at the gates, rusty old things that stood looming like someone had driven a wall of spears into the ground. No one. Not a maid nor a servant, and least of all the Graf himself. The manor grounds lay as desolate as the bare trees that lined its fences: an expanse of yellow grass on either side of the road that led up to the house itself, imposing and black-walled. A ghost silence that hung in the air like a smell that must not be disturbed.

“Christophe Giacometti.”

The words almost made me jump. “Yes,” I said with an elevated voice. I hadn’t heard anyone approach, yet here he was, a servant by the looks of it: clad entirely in black, with hair the color of ink and features of eastern origin. He was sporting a smile bordering on shy, something one might find on women in establishments of questionable reputation. Graf Nikiforov has good taste.

The servant lowered his head in a friendly nod. “I’ve been expecting you. This way please.” He turned and walked away from the gate in quick, elegant strides. What an odd thing to do, I thought with a look back at the gate, but I followed suit.

I was led—wordlessly and with a respectful distance between the two of us—to a nondescript door a good ways farther down the road, the kind that both servants and nightly visitors might use. We had rounded the grounds almost to the other side.

“My apologies for the unceremonious reception.” The servant unlocked the door with a key he had slung over his neck. It creaked the tiniest bit when he swung it open and gestured for me to pass through. “Victor has the only key to the front gate, but he’s not here presently. He’ll join us for supper.”

At the time I didn’t think it odd that a servant would refer to the Graf by his given name; Victor had always been a friendly man (despite his many, many flaws), and it wasn’t beyond him to allow his staff to address him in an equally friendly manner. So I had thought, anyway.

“Is he off picking up strays again?” I asked, partly to alleviate the mood that had befallen me as soon as I had set foot inside the grounds.

The servant cocked his head. He looked rather puzzled. “He didn’t say. Is that something he did often? ‘Picking up strays’?”

“In his youth,” I responded. I had many fond memories of our summers together in Geneva, but this wasn’t one of them; Victor had picked up strays, yes, but he’d brought just as many dead animals back home. Birds, dogs, cats, all kinds of half-rotten carcasses that stank up half the estate because Victor needed them for his “studies.” The servant gave a nod, as if he was considering this information carefully.

We rounded the mansion until we reached the main entrance, and the servant unlocked the doors with the same key he had used before. Peculiar, that the front door should have the same lock as a servant’s entry.

“Please,” the servant said in an inviting tone and gestured into the foyer. It was only slightly warmer than the outside, as if the walls couldn’t quite keep out the chill that seemed to encase the entire property. I exhaled—I could have sworn to see clouds of my breath, but the room was unusually dim.

I followed him up a broad set of stairs across a hallway into a moderately sized parlor, and settled myself into one of the armchairs by the fire. It crackled, the only thing in this room that seemed to make any kind of noise; even the servant had excused himself, without so much as a word or the click or a door closing.

What does Victor want, I asked myself then. I ask myself it now too; he hasn’t been home yet, tardy as he is. The servant—I learned that his name is Yuuri—brought supper to my chamber after sundown. He must have cooked it; I haven’t seen anyone else in this mansion. It’s strangely desolate, and not just in its absence of inhabitants.

Yuuri himself is elusive: I saw him earlier, in the garden tending to a bush of white roses down by the family graveyard. A fine specimen of a human being, but silent as a ghost. He moves with a clockwork grace that speaks of years of practice, but I can’t decide whether I should find this impressive or frightening.

Where did Victor pick him up?

* * *

 

“Mila.” Yuri tapped her on the knee, but she only mumbled something unintelligible and shifted in her seat. “Mila!”

Yuri supposed he could nudge her side or shake her shoulder, but instead he did what he does best and kicked her shin. She jumped with a yelp, disoriented after being woken so roughly.

“Yuri, what the hell?”

“It’s your fault for falling asleep.” He shrugged. “We’re here.”

Ledgorod was a refreshingly small city, rich with the smell of clean air and damp soil. The oldtown—and most of Ledgorod _was_ oldtown—spoke of a history that spanned centuries, from its cobblestone streets to fragments of medieval city walls that were sprayed full with graffiti. Could he ever have lived here, had he been born a century earlier? It was hard to imagine.

Their hotel was down the road from the train station, barely a ten minutes walk. A small little thing with three floors and about as many rooms, judging by the size of the lobby. He let Mila handle the check-in—she _was_ the older one and therefore responsible—and sat on one of the opulent (but comfortable) benches across from the reception. There were pictures all over the walls, some new, some yellowed, and some that creepy ass black and white that old photographs tended to be. One of them showed a proud, dark-walled mansion atop a hill like a gothic crown: Volnyvo. Yuri couldn’t imagine there being another estate of that size, particularly not in a town like Ledgorod.

“Hey,” Yuri said to the receptionist. “What can you tell me about that mansion in the photo?”

The woman leaned across the counter to see what he was pointing at. She was young, probably an intern or something, and didn’t look the least bit interested. “Ah, Volnyvo?” she said. “Used to belong to some noblemen, I don’t remember—I think—”

“Nikiforov?” Mila supplied.

“Yes that. Why? Are you some kind of urban explorers?” Her eyes narrowed. “It’s burned down. Don’t go there.”

“Ah, don’t worry,” Mila said and winked. “I’m just here on a vacation with my boyfriend.”

“What?” Yuri felt the heat rush into his cheeks. “Mi—”

“Anyway.” Mila turned back to the receptionist and made a step to the right so that she was blocking Yuri from her sight. “Breakfast is on the first floor down the hall, right?”

“Correct, seven to ten.” She handed Mila their key. “Welcome to Ledgorod—” she looked over at Yuri when Mila stepped aside to grab her bag “—and enjoy your stay.”

* * *

 

14th of September, 1907

 

Victor came home at an indeterminate—and questionable, but who am I to judge—hour last night. He knocked at my door like a madman, and when I opened half-asleep and wearing less than was appropriate, he greeted me like one greets a long lost brother. He was wearing proper clothing: either he is an early bird, or he hadn’t gone to sleep at all. Knowing Victor, it would be wise to bet on the latter.

We had breakfast in the conservatory, a selection of Indian teas and French pastries before a canvas of greenery. It was pleasant—the way the early sun flooded through the glass, the warm buzz that hung in the air that was so palpably absent from the rest of the house.

“Christophe,” Victor said with a broad smile on his face. “You’ve met Yuuri?”

Yuuri was standing by one of the rose bushes, fingers leisurely brushing its leaves. I hadn’t noticed him enter, but it seemed like he’d been there for a while. He smiled at the mention of his name and sat on an empty chair to Victor’s left. “I have met Yuuri. I have not,” I said, “met anybody else. Is he your only servant, Victor?”

“I—” Victor looked at Yuuri, then back at me. “What gave you the impression?”

“Well, he tended to me. I assumed.”

Yuuri chuckled. “I’m not his servant,” he said. “I just like to be hospitable.”

“Ah.” An interesting revelation. “So you’re his house wife, then?”

Yuuri’s eyes flashed. “In every sense of the word.”

Victor coughed into his tea, red-cheeked as he set his cup down with an audible clink. I had never seen him quite as flustered. “Yuuri...”

“Victor, friend.” I reached across the table and laid a finger on the back of his gloved hand. “Whatever you think you need to hide, you needn’t hide it from me. But tell me,” I said in a more conversational tone, “how has life been treating you? The last time you wrote was during the war.”

Victor retracted his hand and picked up a piece of chocolate bread, glancing at Yuuri briefly. “Quiet. I let my staff go last year, but I’ve been happier for it. It’s only Yuuri and me now.”

“You let your staff go? All of them?” I shook my head. “Victor. When did you learn to manage your own household?”

Victor had the decency to look shamed when Yuuri said, “It’s just me. I tend to everything as well as I can; Victor has other obligations.”

“Ah,” I said, turning towards Victor. “You work?”

“It’s more of a passion project.” He stood, breakfast half-eaten on the table. I only now noticed that Yuuri hadn’t touched his own food at all, that his eyes had been glued to Victor all the while. “Please. Make yourself at home, explore the house if you’d like. Yuuri and I have some business to tend to.”

And then they left, hastily as though Victor had forgotten something important. I didn’t see him again until supper, although I think I spied Yuuri occasionally wandering down hallways or disappearing through doors. He didn’t seem to hear when I called out to him, but I suppose he must be very busy with the business Victor mentioned, or perhaps with his duties as a housekeeper; Victor is not the most orderly of men.

It did strike me as odd that Victor had excused himself so suddenly, but I didn’t dwell on it much. There had always been a mysterious air about him, ever since we were children. He did (to his credit) apologize to me at supper, saying that he’d felt sick suddenly, but that he hadn’t wanted to worry me. I’m not sure if I shall believe in a sickness more than in a sudden desire of the flesh.

Regardless, I did explore the manor as Victor had suggested. It’s a majestic house, or at least it had been. Much of the furniture showed signs of wear, and the farther I strayed from the parlor the dustier and less cared for the rooms became. It also grew considerably colder, so much so that I went back to my room to fetch my coat.

At sundown I went down into the graveyard to pay my respects to Victor’s father and mother. They had both succumbed to a sickness I heard, not long after Victor returned from the war in Manchuria.

The graves were neat and well tended to, three rows with four headstones each, carved from white marble and inlaid with gilded inscriptions.

“Hello,” I said to them. My voice rang hollow in the evening air. It felt as though they were watching me, waiting for me to speak. So I said, “Victor has found himself a fine young man. Very polite, very... easy on the eyes. You would not have approved.”

The graves remained silent. I nodded my head at them in a gesture of goodbye and turned to leave when I spotted a thirteenth headstone, plain and nameless inside a rosebush. It stood apart from the others as though it were an outcast. I had walked right past it before.

“Hello to you, too,” I told it. Its leaves rustled as a gust of wind blew through it.

* * *

 

Yuri kicked an empty plastic bottle across the dirt. This place was a dump (but really, what had he expected, it had stood burned down and desolate for over a century), and quite honestly, an eyesore in the otherwise idyllic landscape of western Russia. Yet it bore a certain familiarity that Yuri couldn’t quite explain; something that itched in the back of his mind like a half-forgotten dream, screaming to be remembered.

It hadn’t been hard to break into the manor grounds: they’d come at dawn and sneaked in through a hole in the fence (and climbed a mountain’s worth of garbage, but, details). It hadn’t seemed like a particularly cold day when they’d left the hotel but now, wading through weeds and debris, Yuri felt a nagging chill clinging to his bones. He should have brought his jacket, or at least a scarf.

“I’ve been wondering,” Mila said when they’d passed the worst of the rubble. They were on the backside of the manor now, where the façade was still largely intact: the walls stood proud (although blackened and patched with ivy and moss), and in one window Yuri spotted an unbroken pane of glass, reflecting the morning sun like a torch. A bit farther to their right, untouched by the defacement the other areas had suffered as if by some divine intervention, headstones poked out of the ground like rows of rotten teeth. “Do people still go missing around here?”

An involuntary chill ran down Yuri’s spine. He clicked his tongue. “Why would you say that _now_ , Mila?”

Mila said nothing, but a mischievous glimmer in her eyes betrayed her excitement.

“Out with it.”

“Are you scared, Yura?” She reached to pat his head, but Yuri ducked out of the way, annoyed. That stupid, stupid hag.

“Out with it,” he repeated, ignoring the question and the challenge Mila was now openly wearing on her face. He was not scared.

“Well...” Mila tapped a finger against her lower lip. “The receptionist said something about some sort of curse, but...” She shrugged, face falling back into a neutral expression. “That was a hundred years ago.”

Yuri scowled at her, but said nothing.

“Really!” she said, and something like a nervous laugh escaped her. “The scariest thing we could find here is a cat jump-scaring us from beneath all that garbage.”

_And the remains of all those Nikiforovs_ , Yuri thought with a glance at the gravestones. They were all mossy, white marble barely visible. Still... Yuri walked up to the nearest one and scratched away all that dirt and weed and soot. Even so, the name wasn’t legible and neither were those on the other eleven headstones. These were generations of his family buried right beneath his feet, but Yuri couldn’t feel more disconnected from them. Did one of these graves belong to Victor? Had the madman even received a proper burial, or had they left his remains in the house he himself had set on fire? The thought made him shift uncomfortably.

Yuri rose and turned to walk back to Mila when he noticed a thirteenth grave, flanked by a bush on both sides. He’d taken it for more weeds, but evidently it wasn’t; no, this was a rosebush, covered in thorns and little white buds. The headstone itself, gray and nameless. It gave Yuri a foreboding feeling, something peaceful yet menacing, like a beast in slumber. He quickly walked away.

“Find anything?” Mila asked when he returned to her side. There was something solemn in her voice, like... _She’s trying to be respectful,_ Yuri realized. He’d never admit it out loud, but that was a nice gesture.

“No,” he said instead. “Let’s keep walking.” He’d keep the last grave a secret. It felt private, somehow, like it was intended for his eyes, and his eyes only. Mila wouldn’t have been able to see it, right? It would have looked like a normal bush to her.

_A rosebush,_ Yuri thought. _Creeping vines around an unknown corpse._

They hadn’t told anyone about coming here, not Georgi or Lilia or—God forbid—Yakov. If anything happened... would their bodies be forgotten beneath centuries of rubble as well?

* * *

 

15th of September, 1907

 

It was mid-morning when I woke. Strange noises in the walls hadn’t let me sleep the night before, a crescendo of foot steps and scratching that seemed to come from inside the walls, accompanied by moans that were either pained or pleasured, or perhaps both. I winked at Yuuri when I passed him in the hallway; he ducked away, his face a delightful shade of embarrassment.

I was left to my own devices again after breakfast—Victor needed to tend to this business of his, which seemed strange to me, almost neglectful on his part as a host. I didn’t dwell on it though, and took to wandering the manor again. The same old chill and emptiness greeted me the farther from my rooms I ventured, and I soon grew bored. So much for an eventful holiday.

Eventually I came upon Victor’s study. Voices were coming from inside, hushed but not indecipherable. And pleading, as far as I could hear.

I should not have eavesdropped for as long as I did. I should not have eavesdropped at all. But something Victor said made me halt.

He said, “He is a good man.” Innocent words, but Victor’s tone was desperate, urgent. To my own dismay I crept closer, careful not to make a sound. The door to the study stood slightly ajar, enough to peek inside and see a portion of the room.

Shelves upon shelves lined the walls, each bursting with animals sat atop them, an array of birds and rodents and small dogs. Dead, with their skin and fur stretched over wooden frames and their eyes replaced with glass in an attempt to imitate life.

My gaze passed over them, unfazed. Victor’s passion for taxidermy had long ceased to unsettle me—and my eyes were drawn to another thing, bathed in the cold sunlight that spilled in from the window. It made my breath catch and my heart pound. It’s a shameful thing, to spy.

There was Victor, sprawled on an armchair, his fingers clutching at the red satin of the armrests and upon him, Yuuri. Yuuri, with his face buried in Victor’s neck and his hands wandering freely down his body. A succubus feeding on its prey.

“That girl was a good child too, I’m sure,” Yuuri purred, barely loud enough for me to understand. Victor’s fingers clenched further, until his knuckles were as white as polished bone. I couldn’t see his face—it was hidden behind the black muss of Yuuri’s hair—but I heard the whimper that escaped him.

“Victor,” Yuuri said, shifting on Victor’s lap in a way that drew another quiet sound from him. “Will you do forbidden things with me?”

I should have walked away and left them to their own business—but I lifted a hand and knocked, twice, audibly against the door. Yuuri’s head shot up; a flash of red hot fury crossed the brown of his eyes, replaced a second later by a dusting of pink on his cheeks. He scrambled off of Victor’s lap and distanced himself hastily.

I took a respectful step backwards, turning my back to the wall, and waited for them to emerge from the room, donning the most ignorant look I could muster. As far as they were concerned I had just arrived, unaware of what had been going on inside.

When Victor finally appeared he looked more composed than I would have imagined. His suit was immaculate when I would have thought it rumpled, and his smile was friendly and inquiring, without a hint of unease.

“Fancy a walk?” I asked him. He glanced back inside the study, then at me and nodded.

Our walk took us from the manor into town along a tree-lined promenade, and then along a boulevard that opened up into a plaza in whose middle stood a fountain. A lovely stroll, if it hadn’t been for the obviously hostile looks we attracted.

“What did you _do_ to them?” I asked, incredulous but not quite serious. I’m aware of the general dissent among Russia’s population regarding the upper class.

Yet Victor seemed unwell, almost perturbed by their animosity.

“They blame me for a number of things,” he said. “Their crops wither, their children disappear, their cattle dies on the fields. They say it’s a curse that I brought upon them, a disease that I carried over from Manchuria, from Yuuri.” He halted and sat on the edge of the fountain, leaning back on his hands. “They say I murdered my parents.”

A grave silence descended upon us, marked by the pitter patter of the fountain behind us, and the burning gazes of passers-by. I had expected the resentment to be mutual, at least in part because of those ridiculous accusations. But Victor’s words carried no rage, not even bitterness; just the tired admission of defeat.

We made our way back shortly afterward. The outing had turned from pleasant to poignant, and extinguished all appetite for lunch that I might have had. Poor Yuuri, who had stayed behind to prepare us a meal.

We came by the graveyard on our way back to the house. Victor, who had been lost in his own head ever since his revelation to me, stopped and knelt by the thirteenth, the one I had almost overlooked.

“Who’s buried there?” I dared ask.

Victor was silent for a long while, caressing the white roses like he was saying farewell to a lover. I did not push the matter.

Eventually, he said, “No one is buried here.” He looked at me and smiled, a pitiful little thing that cracked the moment our eyes met. I averted my gaze and let him speak.

“Here lie the memories of Victor Nikiforov,” he said as if he were reciting a poem. “The memories of the war in Manchuria, the memories of his life and love.”

He laid a bare hand on the headstone as if to feel for a heartbeat and closed his eyes, frowning.

“What happened to you in Manchuria?” I asked, sitting beside him. I took his hand, just like I had when we were children.

“I fell in love.”

* * *

 

The air inside the manor smelled stale, of old coal and dust. Morning sun filtered through the cracks in the walls and ceiling, casting angular shapes of light onto the ground. There was barely anything left of the east wing, and almost nothing of the western one save a few sunken pillars and the skeleton of something Yuri thought might have been a greenhouse at some point.

Curiously, once they had accessed the building there had been none of the trash that littered the garden outside: rubble and scorched timber, sure, but not a single plastic bottle or carton or spray can. It was as if Yuri and Mila were the first people to enter here in a century.

“Christophe,” Mila said, halting.

“What?”

“Christophe.” She frowned and pulled a rolled up stack of papers from her bag. The journal—she’d brought it? “That’s the name of the friend who visited the estate before the fire. You think he had anything to do with it?”

“What makes you say that,” Yuri said.

“Here.” She fished for her phone and did a quick search for Volnyvo. “The house burned down on the night of September 18th, and”—she skimmed through the journal’s pages until she found what she was looking for—“yes! That’s a day after the last entry.”

Yuri glanced at the journal. The photocopy was gray, barely legible in the half-light, but the date in the corner read indeed September 17th, 1907. The corners of it, of the original paper, were blackened and uneven. If his birth mother had had the book, what were the chances it had been found in this very manor? What had become of Christophe?

“So you think he, what, torched the house?”

“Maybe.” Mila stowed the journal back into her bag. “But I think it’s more complicated than that.”

Yuri ducked to pass beneath a wooden beam. There was a niche in the wall to his right, and the sorry remains of a bust within. This must have been a hall, or maybe a parlor. “What makes you think that?”

“Well,” Mila said. “I think it was the curse!”

“Seriously.”

“Hey!” She crossed her arms at the glare Yuri gave her, pouting. “At least play along.”

Yuri shook his head. They wandered from the hall into better preserved rooms, lined with half-intact windows and doorways that let light spill in from outside. Century-old dust lay undisturbed like a blanket atop all the rubble and broken furniture.

Something crunched under Yuri’s shoe. His heart gave a hard _thud_ when he knelt to inspect it: it was a splinter, unnaturally large and gray like the rest of the house, but unmistakably a bone. Was this...? Had Victor Nikiforov died in this very room, his remains scattered like sand without even the hope of a burial to put his soul to rest?

“Look here!” Across the room, Mila was pushing against a knocked-over pillar of wood.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” Yuri jumped and skidded across the room. He grabbed her hand to pull her away from it. “Do you want the whole house to collapse?”

“There’s a door,” Mila said. “Look, the pillar isn’t supporting anything. Help me?”

Yuri clicked his tongue but grabbed onto the pillar, straining his muscles against it; it hadn’t been moved in a hundred years but it gave, and crashed onto the ground in a cloud of dust and ash. Yuri covered his mouth with his sleeve.

He reached out, tentatively, and pressed at the door. It opened easily, revealing a staircase down into a cellar.

“What the hell.” Yuri took a hasty step back.

“Let’s go,” Mila said, pulling him along. The flashlight from her phone illuminated the steps, and then the expanse of a wine cellar, filled with rows and rows of barrels. They were dusty, but untouched by the fire.

“What the _hell_ ,” Yuri said again. He flipped on his own flashlight and held it high; its light barely reached the other side of the room.

He heard it as they were making their way through the rows: the sound of something grating against stone, a soft scratching that made the hairs on Yuri’s neck stand on end. Rats? He couldn’t tell where the noise was coming from.

Mila seemed unperturbed as she inspected another barrel, and the faded letters etched into it. Yuri left her to it; he wasn’t an expert in wine, or whatever the fuck else those barrels contained. There was something else he wanted to take a look at, a barely-there niche in the wall he’d spotted earlier. The scratching quieted as he approached it.

“Oh,” he whispered. “Shit.”

* * *

 

16th of September, 1907

 

I woke today with a strange headache and a feeling of grogginess in my limbs. I should probably attribute this to the raised voices and stomping footsteps; it appears Yuuri and Victor had an audible disagreement last night.

Or perhaps it was the screaming that had woken me in the middle of the night, of which I only have a hazy recollection. I remember more scratching noises, coming from so deep within the walls I’m not entirely sure they hadn’t come from my own head instead. I had gone to bed with the pleasant buzz of wine in my blood, although I don’t think I had enough of it to elicit a hangover.

Yuuri informed me at breakfast that Victor had gone out in the night, and evidently not yet returned. Yuuri himself seemed different: he inquired with great curiosity about Victor’s childhood, and the nature of our relationship. I in turn asked about Manchuria, assuring him that he had no judgment to fear from me.

“I wouldn’t be who I am if not for Victor,” Yuuri said. He was looking at me with open interest, like I was a book that needed to be studied. “In many ways he created me, and I love him for that.”

“That’s very poetic,” I said.

Yuuri blinked. “It’s true.”

I nodded in assent and set my plate aside. The breakfast I had been served was peculiar, an experiment as Yuuri had called it: scrambled eggs and minced meat the animal of which I hadn’t been able to discern. Something exotic, perhaps, or cooked in an unconventional manner.

“I was afflicted with the same illness that took Victor’s parents,” Yuuri said after a moment of silence. “You went out into the town yesterday.” He averted his gaze, fingers clenching around his fork. “I’m sure you’ve heard what they say about me.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “Well, it does bother me. But I don’t believe it.”

Yuuri smiled down into his tea. After a while he looked up, eyes alight. “What if it’s true? What if we’re responsible—Victor created a curse, and I corrupted him to do so?”

I rested my chin on my palm. “Well, did you?”

Yuuri shook his head.

“See,” I said. “Then you didn’t.”

This seemed to calm him, as he returned his attention to his food. Neither of us talked for the remainder of breakfast, enjoying instead an amicable silence. Afterward, Yuuri offered to show me the wine cellar, which piqued my interest. It was a part of the manor I hadn’t yet seen, and for all that Victor was proving to be a terrible host, at least Yuuri seemed determined to make up for it.

The cellar itself was smaller than I had imagined, considering the size of the manor, but it held rows upon rows of barrels, each containing wines of exquisite taste. We had brought glasses for tasting and to my amusement, Yuuri had not denied his intentions of getting me inebriated. He seemed to take his alcohol better than me, as I soon had the pleasure to find out.

“Would you like to see what’s beneath the wine cellar?” he asked after we had tried the wines from a good portion of the first row.

I made my agreement known with a chuckle and a nod, and Yuuri led me to a nondescript door that I would have taken for a patch in the wall if I hadn’t been standing right in front of it.

“A secret chamber,” I said with enthusiasm.

Yuuri nodded with an innocent smile and lighted a lantern before pulling the door open. The little cone of light revealed nothing but darkness, and the first few steps of a staircase leading down into it.

Neither of us spoke on the way down, but the chill of anticipation sobered me up. The walls were curiously devoid of mold and cobwebs; it struck me as bizarre that this part of the manor would be cleaned more frequently than the rooms above ground, but evidently this was the case. I asked Yuuri about it, but his response was vague. They used it as food storage, he said.

Eventually the staircase ended, leading into a chamber of medium size from which three doorways seemed to lead in different directions.

“Don’t leave my side,” Yuuri said. His face was dipped in shadows. “It’s a maze down here. I wouldn’t want you to get lost.”

He led the way through the middle door down a hallway. Occasionally there would be a room adjacent to the corridor, small cells whose doors were broken or missing entirely. The farther we went, the more I became aware of the noise: scratching sounds, the same I had heard in the previous nights. Like rats gnawing their way through the foundation of the building, or nails dragging across the inside of the walls. Sometimes a gust of wind would blow through the corridor, carrying with it the sound of moans and complaints.

“We do have a problem with rodents,” Yuuri said after I had inquired about the noises. He didn’t elaborate, but stopped in front of one of the cells whose door was still intact and pushed it open. “I hope you don’t mind the morbid.”

I recoiled. There, inside cell lay the perfectly preserved remains of a child. Its bones gleamed white in the light of the lantern as if someone had polished them. Its jaw hung crooked from the little skull, still embedded with a second row of teeth like larvae in their nests. The walls around had marks on them, as if the child had desperately tried to dig its way to the surface.

“Her name is Anna,” Yuuri said, stepping into the cell and kneeling. He picked up a bone from her hand and turned it in his fingers. “Victor cleaned her bones when he found her.”

“You… named a dead girl,” I said. My skin felt as though a colony of ants was crawling across it.

“Victor did.”

Victor did. Of course Victor had named a bloody dead girl he had found in the dungeons of his ancestral home.

“He has always had a... fascination with dead things,” I said. A leaden weight had settled in my gut, hot acid that twisted my insides and set my senses aflame. The chafing noises rose to a storm in the walls around.

“He has.” Yuuri rose. The lantern cast dancing shadows into the room as he moved; for a moment, the child’s skeleton seemed to twitch.

Stomping, accompanied by the loud rasping of breath echoed through the hallway. I jumped and crashed against something cold, hard: the stone wall, slick with underground dampness. I exhaled in an attempt to calm myself, but my heart would not slow.

Yuuri seemed unimpressed as he raised the lantern and took a step forward. The flames painted his eyes a crimson storm.

Another light appeared at the end of the hallway, swinging violently back and forth. “Yuuri,” it howled in Victor’s voice.

A moment later, Victor himself appeared behind a lantern, with his eyes blown wide and breaths coming in pants. He must have been running through the entire manor. I relaxed only a little at his sight; he looked as if he had seen a ghost.

“Victor,” Yuuri greeted. “You found us.”

Victor nodded, but didn’t acknowledge him further. Instead he looked me up and down with a frown before his features softened.

“Is everything alright?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said with a hesitant smile. “Yes, it’s fine. I only thought...” He didn’t elaborate on what he’d thought, and I didn’t implore any further. Not while the hairs on my neck told me I was being watched; I would speak to Victor later, in private.

* * *

 

“A dungeon,” Mila said. “That’s... that’s something.”

Her skin was ashen, tinted blue in the light of her phone screen. A cautious tone had crept into her voice ever since Yuri had shown her the door to the second basement and led her down, as a sort of payback for dragging him into this mess in the first place. But he himself was feeling increasingly on edge as they tiptoed down the narrow tunnel. Why, _why_ had he gone along with this?

The scratching was back and oh, so close now, close enough that Yuri thought, sometimes, to feel nails dragging along his skin. His hand twitched, clenching and unclenching, and his mouth was pulled into a taut line. He hadn’t spoken a word since he’d come down here, not at all, while Mila seemed happy to just _babble_ , to disturb the cover of silence. But Yuri was _not_ scared.

He scrunched his nose. The air smelled stale and damp; he tasted it on the back of his tongue.

“Gross,” he murmured.

“Yuri, if...” Mila bit her lip. “You’re—”

“You owe me,” Yuri said. “You owe me so big, and when we’re back in Saint Petersburg I’m going to cash in on _all_ of it.”

“What? Why?” Annoyance flashed over her face.

“Well, you dragged me here!”

“I did not.”

“You coerced me.”

Mila giggled. “Yura, if you’re scared we can always turn back.”

“What? No way.” Yuri scowled and stomped ahead, the cone from his flashlight bobbing up and down. “Come on, hag.”

He didn’t have to walk long. The tunnel opened up into a circular chamber with a high table in its middle.

Yuri blanched. Upon the table lay a lump and, oh God, were those _bones?_ White as if they had been picked clean, a beacon in the otherwise dark room. How could bones be so clean after a hundred years? Nobody had set foot inside the manor since the fire, let alone this secret basement... right?

A hand on his arm made him jump. “I take everything back,” Mila said. Her eyes were blown wide. “Let’s just—let’s just go.”

Yuri had no objections as she took hold of his hand and pulled him out of the room, back through the tunnel. He gripped at her, buried his fingers into the flesh of her hand until he barely felt it. He could berate himself later for it but now, if he let go, he would lose his anchor.

The scratching grew louder as they hurried back, a hundred nails—claws—against the stone, a desperate plea to be _let out._

“Victor,” someone whined. A faint voice, a whimper. “Victor?”

Yuri stopped. Mila tugged at his hand, but he shook his head. It was ghost quiet now.

He’d halted in front of a door, sturdy unlike the rest of them. Unyielding metal, solid save for a tiny slit at eye level. Yuri raised his flashlight.

A set of bloodred eyes flashed behind the slit.

* * *

 

17th of September, 1907

 

I have made the decision to return home.

Something about this manor makes my skin crawl and stomach twist. It’s like a disease that permeates its rooms, a rot that lingers in the air and corrupts everyone who breathes it. Perhaps the villagers feel it too; perhaps they were right about the curse, in one way or another.

The nature of this affliction is foreign to me, an intangible force with Yuuri at its center. I will seek out my physician once I’m back in Switzerland. I can only hope he is willing to work with the occult, or I will be forced to find myself a priest.

Yuuri is not human. He is changed, in some way, although I cannot say _how_. Victor would not elaborate when I asked him yesterday.

“I love Yuuri,” he said. “I will serve him the world on a silver platter if he asks.”

I’d had to corner him in his study, long after supper had been served. The dead animals on his shelves had glared at me through darkened glass as I closed the door behind me.

“He said you changed him,” I said. “What did he mean, Victor?”

Victor remained silent, staring into the distance behind me. His posture seemed casual as he sat in his armchair with his legs crossed, but the skin around his eyes was red. His fingers were playing with a golden ring that hung from a leather band around his neck. Finally he stood, sighing, and picked up a framed picture from his desk. He handed it to me.

It was a photograph of him and Yuuri by a river in an unfamiliar city, both of them grinning like children who had happened upon a pot of candy. Victor’s arm was slung around Yuuri’s waist.

“Vladivostok, two days before we were set to return to Russia. I shouldn’t...” He frowned, brushing a finger against the photograph. “I shouldn’t have convinced him to come with me.”

I placed the picture back on the desk and took his hand. “What happened?”

Victor averted his eyes. “He became ill,” he said. “A mere week after my parents passed. He should have...” He dropped his head onto my shoulder, squeezing my fingers. His body began to tremble. “He should have died.”

I laid my hand on his neck, brushing my fingers through his hair like I had when we were children. “But he didn’t.”

“He didn’t,” Victor agreed. “And it’s my fault. I played with forbidden things, Christophe, and now...” He buried his face deeper into my shoulder. The hem of my shirt was starting to soak with tears.

“How can I help?” I asked.

“You can’t.”

Victor stiffened, and his hands let go of mine. I hadn’t heard Yuuri enter but here he was, clad all in black. I wouldn’t have noticed the blood on him if it hadn’t sullied his skin as well.

“Yuuri!” Victor darted across the room and pulled him into a tight embrace. “Yuuri,” he said again, laying both his hands on Yuuri’s cheeks. The blood there didn’t seem to bother him.

“You were talking about me,” Yuuri said. His eyes fixed on me, burning red.

“Yes,” Victor said, “I’m sorry. Where...?”

“At the butcher’s.”

A chill spilled into my bones. Victor did not appear disturbed by the wrongness of Yuuri’s statement; he looked at him with soft adoration as he caressed Yuuri’s cheeks with his thumbs, now stained red, and laid a kiss on his temple.

“Go,” he said, facing me. The blue of his eyes was dull, pleading. Icy fingers prickled my neck as I left the study.

I slept fitfully that night, my dreams interspersed with red eyes and the grating of nails against hard stone, washing in from all sides. Guttural screams rang in my ears like insistent bells, a cascade of sound that threatened to pull me deeper, deeper. And then the empty sockets glaring from a child’s skull, accusingly, from across the breakfast table in Victor’s greenhouse.

I woke in a tangle of damp bedsheets. Morning light was flooding my room, golden, as if to shoo away the horrors of last night. It almost managed; the freezing lump in my stomach lingered as I made my way across town, away from the manor. I needed time to think.

It was early afternoon when I returned. My mind was curiously clear: it was as if an unknown poison had been sucked from me. In its place had formed a feeling of resolve, a persistent chorus of whispers that echoed sharp in my head. An idea that perhaps even the strangest malady could be cured.

I found Victor in his study, hunched over an open book. Papers with hasty sketches and diagrams blanketed his entire desk, save the little space where a blue-feathered crow sat atop a branch, wings spread wide as if it had been about to land.

“You’re leaving,” Victor said.

“Yes.” I laid a hand on my breast pocket. There was a train ticket inside.

“Maybe it’s for the best.” He reclined in his chair, arms crossed. “You came because I”—he grimaced—“I haven’t been a very good friend, have I?”

“Victor.” I dropped onto his armchair, smiling. “I want to help, if you’ll let me. That’s why you called me, isn’t it?”

Victor lowered his gaze, tensing. He gave a nod, but there was something akin to resistance in his posture, an internal struggle whose cause I couldn’t discern. Why was he so unwilling?

The door to the study cracked open.

“Victor,” Yuuri said. His smile was polite, but he fixed me with a hungry stare. “I wanted to talk with you about dinner arrangements.”

“O-of course.” Victor had sat up straight in his chair as soon as Yuuri had entered the room, his face devoid of color.

“I will leave you to it, then,” I said and stood. Yuuri’s eyes on me stung like a breath of ice; there was no reason for me to stay while he was in the room.

“Christophe,” he called when I was halfway through the door. I turned my head in his direction. “Would you join us tonight for a toast? I want to say my farewell.”

“Of course,” I said, bowing my head. After tonight, I would be gone. I exhaled when I closed the door behind me.

Inside, Yuuri was speaking, his voice dripping honey. “I want to devour everything you love,” he said.

The grating inside the walls has become unbearable in these past hours, a clock that counts backward until it runs out of time.

_On a silver platter_ , Victor had said.

* * *

 

Yuri screamed. His back crashed against the wall, both his hands clenched at his chest. He’d let go of Mila. He’d dropped his phone.

Something rattled in front of him— _it’s throwing itself against the door._ A bang, deep and hollow. And then another. “Victor,” it cried.

“Yuri!”

Yuri grabbed blindly into the direction of Mila’s voice. He was met with warm skin. A second later the light was back, a too-weak beam from Mila’s phone. They ran.

Behind them, the voice howled. “I will be good!” it cried. Another bang shook the tunnel, then a sound like nails dragging across a chalkboard. “Please don’t leave me again, Victor, I promise I will be good!”

The screams and moans followed them all the way up onto level ground—cries of _I will be good_ and _Don’t leave_ and, chillingly, _I will not eat more of him._

Snow was floating from the sky when they escaped the mansion. Thick flakes, gray against the waning sun. How long had they been down there?

An eerie calm had settled in Yuri as soon as he’d smelled the fresh air. His heart was hammering still, but he barely registered it.

_Snow in April,_ he thought. _How weird._

**Author's Note:**

> I had a class about gothic literature last semester, and I guess it rubbed off on me. Kudos to you if you can guess which two short stories this is (sort of) based on!
> 
> Ninja edit: come scream at me on my [tumblr](https://schmesa.tumblr.com/) !


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